Evening And Morning

In Genesis 1 my Bible says, “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” and so forth for all the days of creation. Is there a reason that evening comes first? I thought maybe it’s because the day actually starts at 12 midnight. Your thoughts on this would be appreciated.

A

The Jewish day begins at sunset and the evening precedes the morning because of Genesis 1. People who know a lot more than I do about the Hebrew language say the word for evening comes from a root that means mixed up or disorderly and recalls the way the fading light at dusk can play tricks on us and cause confusion. The word for morning comes from a root that means discernible or orderly, like the daylight can make things clear to us again. They say having the evening precede the morning symbolizes God bringing chaos into order in the creation.

This is something that can only happen when an outside force is involved in a process, because left to itself everything will always go the other way, from order into chaos. Gardens will become weed patches, multiple strains of pure bred animals will become a single strain of mongrels, finely tuned machinery will cease to work. It’s a natural law sometimes called entropy.

Having the evening precede the morning is God’s statement against evolution, because for evolution to work it would have to violate entropy. In other words it would be a natural law that violates natural law.

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Jack Kelley published over 9,000 Bible Study resources here from 1999, until the Lord called him home in the fall of 2015. His teachings made the Bible clear and easy to understand, and impacted millions of lives. He is the author of all the teachings here, and all materials are available free of charge! His wife Samantha maintains this site as well as their missionary outreaches.